Blink and you might miss it

As we travelled the last few miles at the end of our recent 3500km driving holiday in southern Australia, Pammy said "I wonder what has changed in the two weeks since we left?" She was referring to anything and everything in our local area. "Look, that shop has closed down" ... "and finally they've taken down all the ugly hoarding around that construction site — that new apartment building is almost finished."

No matter how little time you spend away from your home base, in a fortnight something always changes.

And that proved to be true for our little garden. During our two weeks away, one of our garden's best flower shows reached its peak and then quietly faded (just like they do in the forest). New things burst into full bloom, and seeds sprouted. And we weren't here to see any of it. We blinked and missed it all.

Still, it's an interesting thing to do ... leave your garden to its own devices for a while. And so here's what we missed out on over the last couple of weeks.

In the foreground, our usually fabulous scadoxus looked like the stragglers on the morning after a very memorable party. Frazzled, tousled and tired, but they did have fun for a while. In the background, the yellow clivias were in a similar tatty condition.

Poor yellow clivias, they'll be back same time next year, and hopefully there'll be more of them next time (and there'll be an old blogger there to photograph them in all their glory and lavish them with praise).

The one very good thing about the scadoxus section of the garden is that all the baby plants are thriving. In recent years I have been painstakingly raising them from collected seed, and this spring they are growing stronger than ever. There's more than a dozen newbies here and there. I'm just hoping these are not plants that need 10-15 years in the ground before they do their first flowering. I'm not sure if I'll live that long to see all my work come into glorious bloom!

In other pleasing baby news, all the flat-leaf parsley seed which I scattered in a few spots a few weeks before we left have sprouted up through the sugar cane mulch and seem to be powering along. This year all I did was open the seed packet and shake it here and there in the mulched vegie area, then say "you're on your own, kids; good luck". I think this has been my most successful seed-sowing method yet for parsley.

Upon our return we were greeted by some new blooms, including these little mint bush beauties ...

... and all our hanging baskets of pelargoniums perked up in the spring sunshine. 

But the flower show which impressed us the most was this (next) unexpected one ...

Our broccoli patch was in its full glory as adult plants, and the loud humming of the bees all around the broccoli's yellow blooms was a clear signal from the bees to me to "leave our broccoli flowers alone". 

They're perfectly correct, of course. While we grow broccoli with the mindset of "food/vegetable" and tend to look upon these flowers as a signal to replace the crop, the bees adore this plant's flowers, and so until all the flowers fade our broccoli plants are staying right where they are, as a bee temple.

So that's my little report on how our little garden looks after a few weeks of slight neglect (although our wonderful neighbours Nick and Katerina did their usual great job watering the garden for us).

Oh, so how was the holiday? Great! 

I'm still sorting through the thousand or so photos that we took along the way, and once that's done I'll show you some of the highlights, especially the lovely gardens we visited and the new people we met (hi Kerryn in Kyneton!). 

Parsley and me

Are there plants in your garden which you have an uneasy relationship with? For me, parsley is one such plant. My experience with parsley over the years has been generally a good one: I've grown countless healthy crops of parsley, chopped up oodles of the stuff and tossed handfuls into soups, casseroles, salads and sauces ... but ... growing it has always been full of false starts and generally fussing over the things until they're totally happy. 

I find parsley can be a hard herb to get growing, and yet I know of gardeners who complain that their parsley is a weed at their place, it self-seeds like crazy, they never have to plant any, it just pops up ... and what's my problem?

Maybe it's because my garden is overcrowded and small and turnover of plants is high, but I've rarely had self-seeding parsley cropping up of its own volition. I've tried letting plants fully go to seed, but it's never produced much in the way of results. 

Instead, it's a regular ritual to replace and replant my parsley crops. Pictured above is what I planted last weekend — some small seedlings of parsley. The former parsley plants in the same spot suddenly went to seed, so I pulled them up and filled the gap with seedlings this time round.

This is not the ideal way to grow parsley, as parsley grows best from seed, but it can be grown from seedlings, if you are very very good about keeping the seedlings well watered and happy. 

By contrast, and nearby to my bought seedlings, these two happy parsley plants (one flat-leaf and the other curly-leaf) have grown from seed sown a few months ago in late autumn. They barely needed any care at all and are powering along now.

The problem with parsley seed, pictured above, is that when you sow it, it can take three to four weeks just to sprout. It is super-slow to get going.

How's this for backyard science? I once put some parsley seed under my school kids' microscope (an inspired gift from Pammy) and this photo shows what a tough, ridged thing a parsley seed is. You can help to speed up germination of seed by soaking it in water overnight, but it doesn't speed things up all that much. It still takes three weeks.

Half the trick with parsley seed is distinguishing them from weed seeds. You need to wait till the second pairs of leaves appear, and they have the distinctly parsley shape. The first baby pairs of leaves look nothing like parsley. 

And the other trick with parsley seed is to simply sow lots of it. Don't worry about neatly planting one here, another there. Just scatter them in small batches, and water well, so the seed slips into cracks in the soil. Keep the area lightly moist for the next month (!) and eventually a goodly number of seeds will come up, and the baby plants that manage to grow on will usually be tough, robust and healthy.

A few years ago I sowed a whole packet of curly parsley seeds to form a border around a potager vegie bed. It took months to get the whole thing going, and it was the typical mad labour of love that I like to do sometimes. But it did look nice and every plant was wonderfully healthy and quite gorgeous.

That said, growing parsley from seed takes time and patience, so it's much easier to buy either a punnet of established seedlings, or a large pot of parsley and divide it up into several clumps. Here's a few tips that might make the process work.

1. Don't over-handle the seedlings. I like to buy a pot or two of parsley seedlings, which might, if you counted them, contain 30 fairly tiny, delicate seedings. What I do is divide that into 3 clumps of 10 seedlings each, then plant each clump. Parsley is notorious for going into "transplant shock" (it's a problem it shares with some other members of the same Apiacaea family, such as parsnips, carrots, chervil and dill).

2. Water the seedlings well. Of course, water well at planting, but never let seedlings feel stressed by a lack of water. Depending on the weather (such as a series of several warm spring days) that might mean daily watering with a light spray.

3. Mollycoddle them with seaweed solution. Here in Australia the leading brands are Seasol and Eco-Seaweed, but whatever you use, apply some liquid seaweed solution at planting time, and probably once a week for the first month of growth. This stuff isn't a plant fertiliser, but it is a "root-growth promoter" and also a plant-stress reducer, so it is very useful in keeping wobbly parsley babies on the right track.

After about a month in the ground, if your parsley babies are getting bigger and look like they're happy, they should turn into normal, healthy parsley plants. It's just that first month after planting seedlings which is tricky, where seedlings need extra care.

4. Take out insurance and scatter some seed. It might seem like overkill, but after planting parsley seedlings I also scatter a few seed in the same spot for luck. They'll take four weeks to sprout, and if all goes well with your seedlings, you'll never know what happened to those seeds. But if the transplanted seedlings don't make it, it's almost certain that the seed-raised plants will.

I think that's enough on parley for now ... may your crops thrive.

Little green woolly head

Lately, when I head out into the garden in the late afternoon to pick some mixed leafy greens for a salad,I stop at our woolly-headed chervil pot and pick a few of its soft, mildly aniseed-tinged leaves to add their gentle, pleasant flavour to the mix. This lovely little potted herb is one of the stars of our garden right now. It's such a beautiful green colour.

Extremely up close and personal, you can see why some people
mistake chervil for parsley, but chervil leaves are much smaller
than parsley, and have an altogether different flavour.

This pot full of baby chervil has probably the softest foliage
of any plant I have ever touched, so soft you sometimes wonder
whether it's actually there. It's round, like a head of fluffy,
woolly hair, and that green colour is freshness itself.

As with growing parsley, the secret to growing chervil seems
to be to grow it from seed. As I had my macro lens out for that
opening foliage shot, I thought you might to meet chervil seed.
I sow chervil seed fairly thickly, barely covering the seed with
seed-raising mix. When they come up, I don't bother to thin out
the plants, either. They look so lovely as a dense crowd. 

Perhaps a size comparison is more useful: on the left are chervil
seeds and on the right are some curly parsley seeds. So chervil
seed is long, narrow and dark. Chervil comes up more quickly
than parsley (two weeks, compared to parsley's three or four).
Chervil and parsley are relatives (along with carrots and
parsnips) and all these plants grow best from seed, and quite
badly from seedlings (that's because they send down a long
taproot that doesn't like to be disturbed). Like parsley, chervil is
one herb which can do well in semi-shade, so it's a good one for
inner-city gardens, many of which don't get all-day sunshine.

While I read in some cookbooks that chervil and parsley can be substituted for each other, I don't really agree, apart from using both as a token garnish. I have both herbs growing here, and each has its own uses. 

The flavour of chervil is more delicate than parsley, so it's at its best in a salad, or tossed into a pot moments before serving. It also adds a real flavour lift to blandish vegies such as zucchini (courgette) and squash. 

Flat-leaf parsley, by comparison, has a more robust flavour that contributes itself to soups, casseroles and other slow-cooked dishes, pasta sauces, salads such as Lebanese tabouleh, and spice pastes such as North African chermoula. 

I'm still exploring chervil's uses (and I suspect there will be many) but discovering its vividly green, soft-leafed beauty is a very pleasant thing indeed.